Vietnamese bride Vu Thi Hong Thuy, 21, chats with customers at the shop where she works in Weijian village in Henan. Photo: AFP

Their marriages were arranged for cash, but some of the Vietnamese women who have found unlikely Prince Charmings in remote villages on the mainland say they are living happily ever after.

"Economically, life is better here in China," said Nguyen Thi Hang, one of around two dozen women from Vietnam who have married men in Linqi.

The township is a patchwork of hamlets spaced among cornfields deep in the mountains of Henan , one of the mainland's poorer provinces.

It is some 1,700 kilometres away from Vietnam, but is a new market for an expanding and sometimes abusive marriage trade with Southeast Asia.

The business is fuelled by demand from rural mainland men struggling to find wives in the face of their country's huge gender imbalance, driven by its limits on family size.

Hang, 30, arrived in Linqi last November and struggles to communicate with customers at the dusty village store where she sells noodles, soft drinks and cigarettes.

But her basic living conditions, a tiny bedroom with bare concrete walls and an outdoor long-drop toilet next to a cage of chickens, were an improvement on her previous home, she said.

"We lived in a bad quality brick house in Vietnam and were farmers so had to work hard in the rice fields," she said.

Her marriage to a local 22-year-old was arranged by her family, she said, with small ceremonies held in her home town and the mainland.

"I knew they gave my family some money, but I did not dare ask my parents about that," she said. "My relatives told me to marry a Chinese man, they told me they care for their wives and I wouldn't have to work so much, just enjoy life," she added, smiling at a group of children buying sweets.

Decades of sex-selective abortions by families who prefer boys to girls now see 118 males born for every 100 females, according to government statistics.

The resulting gender gap has led to an explosion in "bride prices", payments traditionally made by the groom's relatives, hitting men in the poor countryside the hardest.

"To get married, the bride's family will often require a car and a house, so it's easier to get married if you have more money," said shopkeeper Wang Yangfang. "In Vietnam, they demand lower prices."

The typical cost for a Vietnamese woman is 20,000 yuan (HK$25,000), Linqi residents said, less than a quarter of the local price, and such a bargain that more than 20 Vietnamese women have found homes in the area in recent years.

But the trade is also rife with abuses. At a shelter in Vietnam, a reporter spoke to a dozen girls who said they were tricked by relatives, friends or boyfriends and sold to men from the mainland as brides. Myanmar's government said in a 2011 report that most trafficking from the country was "committed solely with the intention of forcing girls and women into marriages with Chinese men".

Police on the mainland "rescued and repatriated" 1,281 abducted foreign women in 2012 alone, most of them from Southeast Asia, the state-run China Daily reported.

Some would have simply changed their minds, or be scams to defraud the men of the bride price, said Feng. Undoubtedly, some of the marriages are voluntary. The men of Linqi have travelled for work to Vietnam, where Vu Thi Hong Thuy, 21, met her husband. "We got to know each other, fell in love and got married," she said.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Joy and pain of the Vietnamese 'brides for cash'